Usuario:Karmickameleon/Taller

K.L. Reich is a semi-autobiographical novel written by the Catalan author Joaquim Amat-Piniella. It is based on his experiences as a Spanish Republican prisoner in the Mauthausen concentration camp during the Second World War. The first version was written in Andorra between 1945 and 1946, following Amat-Piniella’s liberation from the camp. However, its publication was delayed for 17 years by state censorship in Franco’s Spain. It was finally published in 1963​, first in Spanish translation and then in the original Catalan.

Title

The title of the novel refers to the letters ‘K.L. Reich’ (Konzentrations Lager​ Reich), which were stamped on all the objects and articles in the camp. Amat-Piniella, who worked for a period in the Effectenkammer, the camp’s civilian clothing warehouse, would have seen this stamp innumerable times. “Printed in ink on all the clothing, burned into the wood​, Emili has had it constantly before his eyes for four and a half years, and he knows that it is the stigma with which they wanted to mark him too, the only epitaph his dead comrades have been given.”

Dedications

The novel is dedicated to Amat-Piniella’s good friend Pere Vives i Clavé​, who was murdered in the camp in 1941, and to General Omar N. Bradley, who headed the American forces that liberated the camp in 1945.